French court frowns on Google autocomplete, issues $65,000 fine

A French court fined Google $65,000 because its search engine's autocomplete …

A court in Paris, France has fined Google $65,000 because its search engine's autocomplete feature brings up the French word for "crook" when users type the name of an insurance company.

Google had been sued by insurance company Lyonnaise de Garantie, which was offended by search results including the word "escroc," meaning crook, according to a story posted Tuesday by the Courthouse News Service. "Google had argued that it was not liable since the word, added under Google Suggest, was the result of an automatic algorithm and did not come from human thought," the article states. "A Paris court ruled against Google, however, pointing out that the search engine ignored requests to remove the offending word... In addition to the fine, Google must also remove the term from searches associated with Lyonnaise de Garantie."

A Forbes story says such a ruling is unlikely to occur in the US. But it "sets a bad precedent for Google in Europe. There are quite a few people and companies out there who may have suggestions for their names that could be considered defamatory."

Well, look at it this way, if all sorts of companies, individuals, and organizations in Europe start suing Google for perceived autocomplete slights, maybe Google will shut down in Europe. That'll teach them to offer a valuable service!

What a strange ruling... If Google was auto-completing a statement like "Lyonnaise de Garantie [will steal all your money]" then that seems much more likely defamatory, but just associating it with a word?

As allbeec13 said, the only statement Google is making is that "Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc" is a commonly searched combination of words, which is true, right? And yet still defamatory?

You mean Google might actually have to follow the laws of the countries in which it operates? Quelle horreur!

Yea, that was a close thing all right! Imagine the hubris of Google as a search engine company somehow thinking it knew more about search-engine mechanics than a French court! Glad we got that clarified.

What a strange ruling... If Google was auto-completing a statement "Lyonnaise de Garantie [will steal all your money]" then that seems much more likely defamatory, but just associating it with a word?

As allbeec13 said, the only statement Google is making is that "Lyonnaise de Garantie escroc" is a commonly searched combination of words, which is true, right? And yet still defamatory?

As has been reported in multiple studies, and as we saw first hand in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, the insinuation caused by proximity is enough for people to not only accept a "fact", but denying it causes people to believe it even more strongly. It's exactly why most justice systems have such strict rules of evidence and presentation, and why this court ruled as it did.

WaltC wrote:

Yea, that was a close thing all right! Imagine the hubris of Google as a search engine company somehow thinking it knew more about search-engine mechanics than a French court! Glad we got that clarified.

Where did the court say they knew more about search algorithms than Google? All they said was "This is wrong, fix it", they didn't prescribe specific technical remedies and probably wouldn't want to. As an aside isn't it amazing how Google et al. have no problem filtering at the direction of the PRC, but find it "impossible" in western countries?

You mean Google might actually have to follow the laws of the countries in which it operates? Quelle horreur!

Do you really think there is a law that covers this specific case? As the article states, this is setting a new precedent, one which was clearly up to interpretation .(in which many other countries with similar laws most likely would not have come to the same conclusion). and may not even hold up should Google appeal in a higher court.

Simple solution, remove the auto-complete feature completely from France. Why on earth a company would adhere to a ruling like this is beyond me as it seems completely unreasonable and is most likely not worth the cost of business if any more cases like these arise.

Rulings like these are a disservice to the people, especially for a country of Frances size.

I still don't understand why Google is subject to things like this. Google is a free service to the public, but it is still private company. That is to say it is non-governmental and its use non-mandatory. People say its practically a monopoly, but they are the ones that make it that way. People keep using it because it does its job and does it well. Nobody is twisting your arm and forcing you to use Google for searches or for advertising.Yet all we hear is people suing Google or trying to pass laws to make Google do something.

In this particular case, is this libel? Is Google a publication of sorts? If somebody walks by your house and tells you your lawn ornament is offensively ugly and you need to get rid of it, are you legally bound to do so? I simply do not understand why Google is responsible and can be held accountable. Does popular = responsible? Then again maybe its completely different in France.

You mean Google might actually have to follow the laws of the countries in which it operates? Quelle horreur!

Do you really think there is a law that covers this specific case? As the article states, this is setting a new precedent, one which was clearly up to interpretation .(in which many other countries with similar laws most likely would not have come to the same conclusion). and may not even hold up should Google appeal in a higher court.

First of all very rarely do legislatures write extremely narrowly focused laws, some measure of flexibility and interpretation must exist especially when governing a large country like France. Second courts are tasked with interpreting the law and deciding where it applies, so if the court made the ruling that the law applied in this case then pending appeal it does.

Quote:

Simple solution, remove the auto-complete feature completely from France. Why on earth a company would adhere to a ruling like this is beyond me as it seems completely unreasonable and is most likely not worth the cost of business if any more cases like these arise.

Rulings like these are a disservice to the people, especially for a country of Frances size.

And they may indeed just turn off the feature for France and stop doing business there, I suspect however they won't because even with such "inconviences" they still make plenty of money.

Google's not slandering them. Others have by searching for that term. Apparently Google needs to send them a memo explaining how search algorithms work, and how asking Google to censor the autocomplete suggestions is ... censorship ... or, .... who knows.

Actually, I think it's bad that the title of this article makes it seem like all of France is against Google on this one. It's just one law firm that's making a big stink, and filed a claim in court. I'm sure others in France are rolling their eyes at this stupidity as well.

You mean Google might actually have to follow the laws of the countries in which it operates? Quelle horreur!

Yea, that was a close thing all right! Imagine the hubris of Google as a search engine company somehow thinking it knew more about search-engine mechanics than a French court! Glad we got that clarified.

Before all the Americans in this forum get their panties in a knot about what this says about freedom of speech or freedom of enterprise, or why should a company offering a free service be subject to any laws at all... well, freedom has limitations. Even in the USA, freedom of speech is not freedom to defame a person or a company.

The France, just like the USA, has a defamation law. You aren't allowed to unjustly accuse someone of being a crook (despite the previous poster who believes that insurance should be banned). Now the case seems to hunge on whether Google was actually defaming the plaintiff in this case. It was largely irrelevant if Google said "but other people made us do it". The court is saying "You cannot just hide behind your technology. However you generate the results, you should not defame this company and your engineers need to make more effort to ensure that you do not, regardless of where your data comes from. The general public don't see the difference between Google offering an opinion that the plaintiff is a crook, and Google simply aggregating common searches."

So this isn't some major new piece of precedent. It is simply a court finding on the facts of the case that one company defamed another. The damages are pretty tiny.

Before all the Americans in this forum get their panties in a knot about what this says about freedom of speech or freedom of enterprise, or why should a company offering a free service be subject to any laws at all... well, freedom has limitations. Even in the USA, freedom of speech is not freedom to defame a person or a company.

The Americans of this forum don't need you to shove arguments in our mouths, thanks.

I have no problem with this. The auto-complete feature is basically associating things that the user might not have associated themselves; this can absolutely be defamation, even if unintentional. Yes, I realize how it works - Google auto-completes a search term by looking up the most-common words/phrases people search for in conjunction with what the user has typed so far - and that the only reason a term comes up is that it is popular search term. However, by tying such terms to a company (or individual, or group, or whatever) before the user types it, Google is creating that association in the user rather than just providing search results that the user asked for.

As funny as it is to type "Rick Santorum is" into Google and get gay/an idiot/a douchebag as suggested searches, this is creating an association that I wouldn't necessarily otherwise have had. This might not be defamation under U.S. law, but I can see how it would be considered to be so somewhere else - this isn't the user asking for information, this is Google suggesting to the user that it is an interesting or useful search. Google isn't intentionally creating a negative association, it is just the result of an (easily gamed) algorithm, but the fact remains that they ARE creating a negative association. Turning off auto-complete would be the simplest solution, but if Google really feels that it is a useful feature they could no doubt modify the algorithm to try to avoid negative (or any) associations with proper names, or at least limit it to only auto-completing words as you start to type them rather than entire phrases.

Before all the Americans in this forum get their panties in a knot about what this says about freedom of speech or freedom of enterprise, or why should a company offering a free service be subject to any laws at all... well, freedom has limitations. Even in the USA, freedom of speech is not freedom to defame a person or a company.

The France, just like the USA, has a defamation law. You aren't allowed to unjustly accuse someone of being a crook (despite the previous poster who believes that insurance should be banned). Now the case seems to hunge on whether Google was actually defaming the plaintiff in this case. It was largely irrelevant if Google said "but other people made us do it". The court is saying "You cannot just hide behind your technology. However you generate the results, you should not defame this company and your engineers need to make more effort to ensure that you do not, regardless of where your data comes from. The general public don't see the difference between Google offering an opinion that the plaintiff is a crook, and Google simply aggregating common searches."

So this isn't some major new piece of precedent. It is simply a court finding on the facts of the case that one company defamed another. The damages are pretty tiny.

The problem with this ruling is that it sets a precedent for suing Google for "defamatory" autocomplete phrases, allowing pretty much any French company (or citizen) to grab a paycheck when Google's completely automated autocomplete feature shows something they don't like. It is completely idiotic, especially considering that autocomplete is simply showing what other users have searched for. Perhaps this French insurance company should have requested the IP addresses of those who actually made the "defamatory" searches.

Google never said this insurance company was a crook. It merely showed what other people had searched for. What is normally a useful feature common to many search engines will become a liability, thanks to short-sighted rulings like this.

US defamation laws are very protective of speech, much more so than in other countries. This case would never make it to the same block the courthouse sits on in the US. Nevertheless, I am surprised that an unintentional conjunction of words is enough to be defamatory, without any particular intent.

Before all the Americans in this forum get their panties in a knot about what this says about freedom of speech or freedom of enterprise, or why should a company offering a free service be subject to any laws at all... well, freedom has limitations. Even in the USA, freedom of speech is not freedom to defame a person or a company.

The France, just like the USA, has a defamation law. You aren't allowed to unjustly accuse someone of being a crook (despite the previous poster who believes that insurance should be banned). Now the case seems to hunge on whether Google was actually defaming the plaintiff in this case. It was largely irrelevant if Google said "but other people made us do it". The court is saying "You cannot just hide behind your technology. However you generate the results, you should not defame this company and your engineers need to make more effort to ensure that you do not, regardless of where your data comes from. The general public don't see the difference between Google offering an opinion that the plaintiff is a crook, and Google simply aggregating common searches."

So this isn't some major new piece of precedent. It is simply a court finding on the facts of the case that one company defamed another. The damages are pretty tiny.

The problem with this ruling is that it sets a precedent for suing Google for "defamatory" autocomplete phrases, allowing pretty much any French company (or citizen) to grab a paycheck when Google's completely automated autocomplete feature shows something they don't like. It is completely idiotic, especially considering that autocomplete is simply showing what other users have searched for. Perhaps this French insurance company should have requested the IP addresses of those who actually made the "defamatory" searches.

Google never said this insurance company was a crook. It merely showed what other people had searched for. What is normally a useful feature common to many search engines will become a liability, thanks to short-sighted rulings like this.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Exactly. So now what's to stop a Frenchman from creating (preferably distributed) program that runs the query 'X is a Y' or something similar, substituting their name for X whatever terrible thing happens to be France's hot button issue that week for Y? According to this ruling, after the search result gets high enough to register in the auto-completion list, Frenchman X can now sue Google and get damages based on this precedent. Even worse, anyone who happens to be named X can now sue Google and get damages. Or did I interpret that wrong?

Defamation would be Google having a message saying "This company is crooked!" when someone searches the name, or manually reordering results to bring up ones saying that.

This case, the instant completes are generated by users. So, at most, Google's saying "A lot of people search for this company being a crook". This is in no way defamation; if I say "A lot of people say that Ars is elitist", because a lot of people say Ars is elitist, there's nothing at all wrong with that, even if Ars is not elitist and is emphatic about it. It's merely an accurate piece of information; a lot of people searched for "whatever crook".

I wonder how this differs from search results: would the judge rule the same way if the user typed in "X Company" and the top search result was an angry customer's website titled "Crooks"?

In both cases the user typed in "X company" and the search engine decided, based on whatever ranking algorithm it uses, to prominently display the word "crooks" as part of the search/selection UI in a search process.

Before all the Americans in this forum get their panties in a knot about what this says about freedom of speech or freedom of enterprise, or why should a company offering a free service be subject to any laws at all... well, freedom has limitations. Even in the USA, freedom of speech is not freedom to defame a person or a company.

The France, just like the USA, has a defamation law. You aren't allowed to unjustly accuse someone of being a crook (despite the previous poster who believes that insurance should be banned). Now the case seems to hunge on whether Google was actually defaming the plaintiff in this case. It was largely irrelevant if Google said "but other people made us do it". The court is saying "You cannot just hide behind your technology. However you generate the results, you should not defame this company and your engineers need to make more effort to ensure that you do not, regardless of where your data comes from. The general public don't see the difference between Google offering an opinion that the plaintiff is a crook, and Google simply aggregating common searches."

So this isn't some major new piece of precedent. It is simply a court finding on the facts of the case that one company defamed another. The damages are pretty tiny.

The problem with this ruling is that it sets a precedent for suing Google for "defamatory" autocomplete phrases, allowing pretty much any French company (or citizen) to grab a paycheck when Google's completely automated autocomplete feature shows something they don't like. It is completely idiotic, especially considering that autocomplete is simply showing what other users have searched for. Perhaps this French insurance company should have requested the IP addresses of those who actually made the "defamatory" searches.

Google never said this insurance company was a crook. It merely showed what other people had searched for. What is normally a useful feature common to many search engines will become a liability, thanks to short-sighted rulings like this.

This is why we can't have nice things.

I liked Ari's post but what you mention is what occurs when you start looking at this ruling and its implications. If, for fear of suit, Google removes the autocomplete function rather than trying to ascertain when a proper noun is being paired with a pejorative term. Or, alternatively, Google doesn't see the net benefit to putting hourly workers on the clock removing manually an autocomplete result whenever some Tom, Dick or Pierre gets his panties in a bunch over a perceived slight. In these cases the significant benefit to the public is sacrificed to some rather thin-skinned citizens.

Don't think it will happen in the US, but I don't think we've ever been known as having mastered comprehension of the French psyche.

Before all the Americans in this forum get their panties in a knot about what this says about freedom of speech or freedom of enterprise, or why should a company offering a free service be subject to any laws at all... well, freedom has limitations. Even in the USA, freedom of speech is not freedom to defame a person or a company.

The France, just like the USA, has a defamation law. You aren't allowed to unjustly accuse someone of being a crook (despite the previous poster who believes that insurance should be banned). Now the case seems to hunge on whether Google was actually defaming the plaintiff in this case. It was largely irrelevant if Google said "but other people made us do it". The court is saying "You cannot just hide behind your technology. However you generate the results, you should not defame this company and your engineers need to make more effort to ensure that you do not, regardless of where your data comes from. The general public don't see the difference between Google offering an opinion that the plaintiff is a crook, and Google simply aggregating common searches."

So this isn't some major new piece of precedent. It is simply a court finding on the facts of the case that one company defamed another. The damages are pretty tiny.

At least in the US, defamation is only illegal if it's untrue. In this case, there is at least a strong argument that the defamation is based on truth, as evidenced by the fact that 10s of thousands of people have searched for that exact term. Google isn't hiding behind their technology, they're using it to provide plausibly accurate information which is not defamation.

Exactly. So now what's to stop a Frenchman from creating (preferably distributed) program that runs the query 'X is a Y' or something similar, substituting their name for X whatever terrible thing happens to be France's hot button issue that week for Y? According to this ruling, after the search result gets high enough to register in the auto-completion list, Frenchman X can now sue Google and get damages based on this precedent. Even worse, anyone who happens to be named X can now sue Google and get damages. Or did I interpret that wrong?

How 'bout first Google has to do nothing about it before your pay day? Maybe?

This makes me think of how people gamed the (Google) system by cross-linking sites/pages to result in funny search results. Imagine the autocomplete results we could make for when people type "RIAA", "MPAA", or "DMCA" as searches.

As usual, the Americans in the thread don't like that different countries have different laws.

People (not just Americans) think it's a stupid decision because they don't believe it was defamation, but merely a statement of fact. The statement of fact being that Google said, in effect, "this is something a lot of people search for that begins with what you already wrote" (chosen entirely mechanically, totally indifferent to the actual search string beyond being started with what the user wrote). Not saying the search term is true or anything like that, just that it's begins with what the user wrote and popular (and enough so to appear in the list).

I don't see anything unreasonable that Google has done. Illegal in France? Maybe, maybe not, that depends entirely on their laws.

Exactly. So now what's to stop a Frenchman from creating (preferably distributed) program that runs the query 'X is a Y' or something similar, substituting their name for X whatever terrible thing happens to be France's hot button issue that week for Y? According to this ruling, after the search result gets high enough to register in the auto-completion list, Frenchman X can now sue Google and get damages based on this precedent. Even worse, anyone who happens to be named X can now sue Google and get damages. Or did I interpret that wrong?

How 'bout first Google has to do nothing about it before your pay day? Maybe?

I was thinking the same thing as UncleBoxy until Alfa reminded me of that point from the article.

As other's have suggested then... Google's hubris might have got in the way.France, now, is farting in Google's general direction.